State spending in Oregon doubled in ten years, growing from $30 billion to $60 billion. The Oregon All Funds budget doubled from the budget ending in 2001 to the budget ending in 2011. The state's General and Lottery Funds' budget, a subset of the All Funds budget, went up by 35 percent during that same time.

In the current budget cycle, state spending and taxes have generally been held in check. In the coming legislative session, though, there will be significant pressures to increase taxes to pay for PERS increases, to pay for Gov. John Kitzhaber's expansion of government-run health care and to restore funding to schools.

I've written previously explaining why additional taxes won't solve these problems -- it will take fixing PERS and funding schools first to start with. Astonishingly, though, not everyone has read my articles or agrees with them, and so there will be those in Salem who pursue additional taxes.

More taxes are never popular, and so a common method of selling additional taxes is to have them be paid for by someone else. In cases like Oregon's Measure 66, that someone else was "the rich."

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More recently, in the campaign cycle that just ended, the airwaves and mailers were full of references to "tax breaks for the rich," which shows that “the rich” not paying enough taxes must be a focus group-tested concept that sells.

Although it apparently does well in focus groups, it isn’t true. Nationally, half of all Americans don’t pay federal income taxes. The top 20 percent pay 68 percent of federal income taxes. The top 1 percent pay 22 percent of federal income taxes.

Here in Oregon, high-income earners also already pay the bulk of the income taxes. The top 10 percent pay for just over half of the state's income taxes. The middle-income earners are 30 percent of tax filers and they pay 35 percent of Oregon’s income taxes -- and the bottom 60 percent pay just 13 percent of the income taxes.

The top 1 percent in Oregon pay 20 percent of the personal income taxes. The bottom 20 percent in Oregon pay less than 1 percent of the personal incomes taxes. And the number of "the rich" in Oregon has been going down. The number of Oregonians earning over $500,000 dropped by 36 percent between 2006 and 2009, the most recent years those numbers are available.

Another problem with taxing "the rich" is that many of the high-income earners are actually small business owners who create jobs. Increasing taxes on these small business owners reduces the amount of capital they have available to grow their businesses and hire more employees.

Finally, taxing “the rich” doesn’t always work out as planned, for a variety of reasons. For example, Oregon’s Measure 66 brought in less than 3/4 of the taxes projected when it passed.

Is it "fair" to further increase taxes on high income earners -- i.e., "the rich"? I don't think anyone actually believes that it is. What comes first is the perceived need for more taxes, and then the justifications follow.

Politicians have learned that when the numbers line up -- where the many can vote more taxes for the few -- it's possible to pass these envy taxes. That doesn't mean that they work, or that they're right.

Dan Lucas is an independent researcher and policy advocate, and the Chief Editor for the conservative blog Oregon Catalyst. Follow his work at www.dan-lucas.com.